The last 2 years have been some of the most exciting in the industry.
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about the impact AI is having on software development as a craft.
I’ve read a few posts recently from developers describing a sense of lost identity. AI is writing more of the code, sometimes entire features, and for some people the fun has gone with it.
I understand the feeling. But I think it comes from mistaking the tools of the job for the job itself.
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How We Got Here
When I started out as a .NET developer, a good chunk of the job was remembering things. Namespaces, method signatures, the right overload. If you didn’t know it, you looked it up in MSDN or a book on your desk, and that took time.
I can still remember being on a client site with not internet access but priding myself on the fact that I knew the ASP.NET events and commands from memory that would let me build the main features for a CRUD application with lists, details, nested repeaters and so on!
IntelliSense arrived and you no longer had to remember every class and method name.
Google and Stack Overflow meant almost any problem had been solved by someone else.
Then Copilots started completing lines, then whole methods. Now agents can scaffold entire features while you review the output.
Each of those steps removed some recall from the job. Nobody had an identity crisis over IntelliSense. A few people grumbled about it making developers lazy, but most of us just got more done.
What’s different now is the size of the step. AI doesn’t just remember the method name. It writes the method, the tests, and the pull request description. That’s a much bigger leap, but it’s in the same direction we’ve been travelling for years.
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So What’s The Goal ?
Solve problems. Generate value. Delight users. Make a profit.
That’s it.
No business ever paid a developer to remember syntax. They paid for outcomes, a system that works, a process that runs faster, a customer who comes back. Code was the means of getting there. It was always the means.
That’s why I think the identity question matters. If your sense of yourself as a developer was built on the means, the typing and the remembering, then AI feels like a threat. If it was built on the outcome, AI is a lever. Same tool, very different relationship with it.
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What We Lost
I don’t want to cast shadow on the people who say the fun has gone, because some of it has.
There’s a satisfaction in wrestling with a problem for hours and finally getting it working with your own hands.
There’s hitting flow states, where the code seems to write itself because you know the language so well, and you’re so locked in, that time seems to stop. Caffeine into code and all that.
There’s the craft of writing something clean and elegant that nobody asked you to make beautiful. Sometimes I miss those parts too. It’s a bit like sanding the rough edges off.
There’s also a harder question for people earlier in their careers. Most of us built our judgement by writing a lot of code, much of it bad, but over time, write enought bad code and you end up growing and writing great code.
If AI writes the code, where does the judgement come from?
You still need enough fluency to read what’s produced and know when it’s wrong. You can’t review what you don’t understand.
So, syntax hasn’t fully disappeared. It just stops being the point.
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Where The Satisfaction Lives Now
For me, the satisfaction has moved up a level.
This year I’ve spent a lot of time building RAG pipelines and MCP servers. I typed far less code than I used to. But I spend more time thinking about whether retrieval is returning the right results, what happens at the edges, and what the user actually needs rather than what they asked for.
The interesting decisions are now about framing the problem, designing the system, deciding what not to build, and spotting that something is wrong before the tests tell you. That’s still engineering.
Arguably it’s the part that always mattered most. We just spent most of our time on the typing in between.
Shipping something useful in days rather than weeks has its own kind of fun too. The gap between “I have an idea” and “let’s see what this looks like” is much smaller now.
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Closing Thought
Syntax recall was a tax we paid to get to the real work. AI is removing more of that tax than any tool before it.
If you loved the work for what it produced, the problems solved and the value delivered, there’s never been a better time to be building. If you loved it for the typing, that’s a real loss, and it’s worth admitting. But it was never the goal, and there was never any glory in remember obscure syntax.
What do you think?
Drop your comments below.
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